I usually work with the director and it's just a collaboration between me and the one person. I think you make good movies that way. If the director and the composer can have this common goal and this excitement about making something great, then you're going to do something good.

To make good films, you have to have a good relationship and good collaboration as composer-director, composer-editor, composer-production designer-actor because you're working with the actors on screen.

Piano is very elegant. I also think it's a very truthful instrument.

You don't always want to be using the music in a way to express ideas inherent that are on the screen. You might want to work more around the fringes of the story, and work more with the subtext, and add more depth to the story through the use of music.

I have kind of an intuitive feeling as a composer as to what would be appropriate for those groups and how to feature certain paths in a certain way, whether there was dialogue in a scene, or whether there was no dialogue and music was telling the story at that point.

You can find the whole world of a film in one instrument, or you can find a world of sound in the orchestra.

When you start on a new film, no matter how many you've done before that, I think I've done close to 80 films, but it's always kind of a fun adventure.